


And then I don't feel so bad

by RapidashPatronus



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 19:17:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14837609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RapidashPatronus/pseuds/RapidashPatronus
Summary: How Jyn rallies herself when bad feelings attack.





	And then I don't feel so bad

**Author's Note:**

> Posted for the Jyn Appreciation Squad

Jyn tries all her life not to be childish. Her instincts are stuck at one point in time somewhere on a long flight from Lah’mu to Wrea, and so, when she can, she measures herself carefully.

She hears people say she’s withdrawn sometimes. She’s just trying not to be stubborn, argumentative, nervous. She’s just taking time to fold those things up and put them away so she can do what she needs to do. It comes out sometimes – of course it does. When she’s exhausted, when she’s grieving, when she’s under pressure, out it comes: moody, sullen, firm in the belief that nothing is permanent. It comes from moving around a lot as a child, she supposes. But she’s capable of rationality. After all, she forced herself into the mould of a persuasive speaker in front of the entire Alliance just before Scarif happened. What she really wanted was to make them all know how shrapnel felt in the rain and fire, but she folded it up and put it away.

There’s one thing Jyn allows herself to take from her childhood, though. It’s how she talks herself down when she’s frightened or angry. It’s where she finds the space to fold things up and put them away. Something her mother taught her when they’d been flying away from Coruscant at night. She’d left behind her stuffed tooka, and though Mama promised to make her a new one, she was inconsolable, and frightened, and didn’t know why they couldn’t go back. And Mama had said –  _ Jyn, what else do you like? Look, here’s Mister Iggy. Here’s Bad Mister Goob. See? Do you want to hold them? Tell them about your favourite things. _

These are a few of Jyn’s favourite things:

Her favourite colour is yellow - specifically, bright sunshine yellow. (Curiously, the colour she most hates is also yellow - one specific shade: the soft gold of sakoola petals, which always in her mind turns red.) Bright, cool yellows make her smile. She found a woven rug in geometric yellows and whites in a market, and she traded (quite senselessly, she knows) a half-used blaster pack for it. She uses it as a bedspread and it brightens up her quarters.

Her favourite food is cheese - all cheese, but most of all, mature bantha cheese, with the hard rind and the inky blue veins running through it. She loves how the flavour is pungent at first on her tongue, then with a sharpness on the roof of her mouth that mellows to a soft and creamy aftertaste. She can eat one small piece of that cheese with her eyes closed and savour it for a long, long time.

Her favourite drink is… she doesn’t know what it was, actually. It was a fruit juice somewhere, with an exotic flavour that was lifted by something alcoholic. She’s spent a long time trying to remember what on earth it was and where she had it so she can try to find something like it again.

Her favourite animal is a loth-cat. Mama did indeed, as promised, make her a new stuffed tooka once they reached Lah’mu, but she’d never really sewn anything before and it looked like nothing so much as it did a star, so she called it Starrie and bravely agreed it was a tooka, and imagination did the rest. But real tookas - especially loth-cats, have a special place in Jyn’s heart. She likes their independence - when a feline displays affection, it chooses to; it can take care of itself and so it comes to you not because it needs your help but because it needs your company. It feels to her like a partnership. If she ever imagines being settled in one place, one day, after war, after everything (and sometimes, when she plays the favourite things game, she does imagine it) she likes to think there would be a loth-cat or two to make her house a home.

She doesn’t have a favourite place. She’s moved too many times and too often to let herself form attachments to locations. There are topographies she’s more inclined to like - for instance, she will always be fond of wide, flat, grass-filled valleys, where the green hills rise roundly in the distance, and the sun shines white off the thread of the river, and the flowers freckle the ground with colour - but specific places have no hold on her.

Her second favourite sound is Cassian’s name. Her favourite is her own, but only when he says it.

Her favourite song is a folk shanty from old-time smugglers called “Nobody Owns The Lanes”. She can actually lead a tremendous rendition of it when sufficiently confident, a discovery which has surprised and delighted her friends. Though it’s a riotous, rollicking pirate song with a defiant chorus, she’s also discovered that if she sings it very slowly and softly for herself, it becomes a wistful air; sometimes she sings it that way, when she feels lonely as hyperspace streaks past for hours on end, and it helps. Nobody else has heard that version, but she likes it almost as much as the stompy one -  _ almost _ .

Her favourite droid is Kay. She would never dream of telling him, and she knows she doesn’t need to.

Some other favourite things of hers:

The bobbly feeling of corrugated durasteel floors under her bare feet

The sound of two people walking in step

When she peels the film off a processed protein meal on board a ship and it comes away cleanly without leaving any ragged edges on the rim of the tray

The comforting tug of the cord her kyber crystal comes from, when she pulls on her shirt over it

Standing still under a real water shower and just feeling the water run over her head and down her face

The sound of flimsi tearing very slowly on a very straight line, and the little dust wisps that rise from the tear

The way Baze looks at Chirrut and the way Chirrut smiles because he knows

The word “relentless”

Things that fit perfectly inside other things that were not designed to fit them

 

She thinks of these things, and she’s strong enough.


End file.
